Part of Dave Winer's personal website.

cactus picture Comments on Wes's Web Server

Tuesday, March 03, 1998 at 9:15:09 AM by DW

I just did a very cool responder. I have to go to a meeting right away. Wes, it's baked into the page. Please have a look. It hooks your framework into the website framework.

Re: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wesf/frontier/server/.

It's great, but rough going because of lack of examples or docs.

Wes, here are some feature requests/comments:

  1. I was able to add a responder, but I would have liked a page that showed me how to write a very simple Hello World responder. I did figure it out by looking at the XML responder, which is really simple, I could see how it worked clearly.

    My responder's condition is (string.lower (URI) contains "helloworld").

    Inside the GET method handler it just returns a string:

    on GET (adrParamTable, adrRequestHeaders, adrResponseHeaders)
     adrResponseHeaders^.["Content-Type"] = "text/html"
     adrParamTable^.responseBody = "<html><body>Hello World!</body></html>"
     return (true)

    Have fun, you can call this responder on my test system.

    What is a URI and what makes it different from a URL? Is this too arcane?

  2. user.inetd.config.http.daemon should be a very short script, calling into the webserver table. This will make upgrading easy, you won't need to update the top level daemon script.

  3. user.inetd.config.http.port should be 81, like the previous version. No need to change this since your instructions (correctly) tell me to delete or rename the old http daemon.

  4. user.inetd.config.http.startup should be true (this eliminates the need to call inetd.startone), just quit and relaunch Frontier. This helps reinforce the idea that the server starts up automatically when Frontier launches.

I'm satisfied that it works and that it's going in a good direction. I reviewed the source code and there are loose ends, I'm sure you're keeping track of where they are.

Overall I think the one thing we need most is more writing on this, and more examples.

Otherwise, very good work. We're going to build on it. Let's start streamlining it and documenting it.

Dave

This page was last built on 3/3/98; 9:17:05 AM by Dave Winer. dave@scripting.com.